Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools - Charles Wilkins L. - Страница 12

FOR THE NEXT TWELVE days, the men of the crew lived in a windowless backstreet apartment that had been rented for us by David. This morose concrete grotto was crammed with lurid Moorish furniture: ensembles of leopard skin and red vinyl and purple plush, with big velveteen cushions, and tassels on everything, and poorly dyed carpets. All the trappings of whoredom, right down to the red lightbulb in the front hall. So much attention to tactility but with no actual comforts—not even proper light, or hot water, or even a table to eat off. And of course no art or books. The bathroom, whose encrusted shitter was surely a castoff of Royal Air Maroc, both looked and smelled like a leprosarium. I admired Steve’s response when, together, we laid eyes on the bowl: the double take, the queasy smile, the glance my way as if to say It’s you or me, brother, and the immediate commitment (his) to scouring the thing out.

The kitchen wasn’t much better, and since there was no means of dealing with the trash produced by a perpetually famished rowing crew with little inclination to clean up, it simply accumulated: first in garbage bags, six, seven, eight of them, crowding the kitchen floor, and then in an impassable knee-high heap of loose egg cartons, cereal boxes, orange peels, soup cans, cookie packages; plus the endless plastic bottles and tubs in which Moroccan dairy products are sold and go moldy and die.

The highlight of my days on Rue Salaam (Peace Street)—a lovely address, I thought, for a place that even our gentle-tongued crewmate Sylvain referred to as “a bit crappy”—came on a morning when I had risen in the pre-dawn so as to be early to the boat, and Steve, as a reward for my diligence, placed a saucepan of heated water in the bathroom that I could mix with cold tap water in a grubby plastic bucket that subbed as the apartment’s shower.

Ten of us lived ass-over-chinstrap in this weird little den—all the men but David, who was installed in the Ibis Hotel, a nice-ish two-star a fifteen-minute walk away, with his dark-eyed fiancée, Lali, who was visiting from Tbilisi. Because she spoke only Georgian, Lali could do little more than smile at the rest of us, and languish, and look longingly at David. They were tender and smoochy with one another and spoke softly, probably about taxi fares or laundry, and yet it always sounded intimate and mysterious. At the boatyard, she would stand motionless and decisive-looking beside Big Blue with her hand on the gunnels for a few seconds, then would pirouette suddenly and take a step or two and put her hand on the rudder and stand there for a minute—then would stand on the ladder that led up to the bridge, while David, a few feet away, sweated and hung upside down, fussing with the wiring, or whatever, in some impossible-to-reach place inside one of the holds.

I had an urge to talk to Lali, to be friends with her; she was so alone. Plus, I knew she had lots to say, having survived a ruinous civil war in Georgia, as had David, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But to carry on even a few minutes of conversation would have required focused translation by David, who spoke a poetically quirky English, cut with the inevitable shorthand of television and the web. But he didn’t have time, what with getting the boat ready twelve hours a day. So our discourse was limited to a daily morning greeting—“Hi Lali!”—to which she would respond brightly, “Hi Chordly!”

The women meanwhile lived in a tidy resort apartment five miles from the men, near the waterfront and the port entrance. The place had a contemporary kitchen, a television, two cushy bathrooms with hot showers, plenty of dishes and towels and bedding. About the only thing it had in common with our place was that its furniture appeared to have been swiped out of the same hellacious cathouse. The place had originally been rented by Angela and her partner, Deb Moeller from Bakersfield, California, a woman who put heart and soul into looking after not just Angela—whom she called “Madsen” and treated with tender exasperation—but half of the administrative chores around the expedition: communications, website, media relations, plus any sort of messaging and boat contact that was required from land once we set off. From the time I met them at Shelter Island, it was hard to imagine that Angela could have carried on as she did without Deb, who was her “girl,” so to speak, her adjutant, as well as her manager, advisor, and agent; and driver and photographer; and social coordinator and lover—all of it puttied up and patted into place with painstaking care and affection. If you wanted the lowdown on Angela, you went to Deb; if you asked Angela directly, she’d say, “You’d better ask Deb.”

Above all, Deb protected Angela. On the way into New York City in the van after the training weekend, she had confided to me her rather poignant (and ultimately accurate) fear that people would “take advantage of Madsen” because she was so essentially gentle and unassertive. It was an image that did not seem to jibe with that of a woman who, before her spinal injury, had been in the police corps of that toughest of military branches, the U.S. Marines. The truth was, she had joined the Marines with the hope of becoming a mechanic like her brothers and dad before her, and it was only because of her size (not to mention her reluctance to refuse) that the towering recruit had been pushed into police work. She told me one night over dinner in Agadir about being summoned repeatedly and unhappily to deal with domestic violence at the residences of Marines who had returned from conflicts in, I believe, Southeast Asia. “All these guys,” she said, “had taken ‘desensitization’ training so they wouldn’t be affected by orders, say, to go into villages and slaughter women and children, which was bad enough. But when they got home, nobody ‘re-sensitized’ them, so they were equally insensitive to their own wives and children.”

Originally the whole crew was to have lived in the men’s flop pad. But when Liz Koenig and Aleksa Klimas-Mikalauskas arrived a day or two past New Year’s, after detouring to Marrakesh, it was all quite natural that they settle in with Angela and Deb. For one thing, the four of them were well acquainted after an agonizing seventy-two-hour snow delay at JFK in New York, over Christmas. Plus, they had all endured horrific problems with Royal Air Maroc, which had lost not only Liz and Aleksa’s luggage (it eventually arrived) but Angela’s custom-built ultra-light wheelchair, which the airline replaced with a flimsy little rickshaw of a thing that would occasionally drop a part or two on the sidewalk—not at all the sort of appliance to carry a 250-pound woman with very specific ergonomic requirements.

The boatyard where we worked was within the high guarded walls of the officially designated “Port of Agadir”—a square mile or so of docks and warehouses and boat-building facilities spread out along the seashore at the city’s north end. Immediately to the east rose a desert-dry mountain whose top formed the old-city kasbah, the only remaining feature of ancient Agadir, which had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1960. The city had been rebuilt and was now uniformly modern, including the souk, a vast walled city-within-a-city, where vendors sold everything from handmade leather goods and furniture to fabrics, shoes, handicrafts, fresh fruit, spices, appliances, electronic goods—anything you might want, up to and including the illicit hashish for which Morocco, perhaps the most liberal of Muslim countries, is renowned. Donkeys waited outside by their owners’ carts, amidst street garbage and squawking chickens and the occasional dead rat or dog.

Each day began for us with a long, sometimes harrowing ride from the apartment to the boatyard in one of the hundreds of tiny orange fender-bashed taxis that pinballed around the city, honking, squealing, blasting Arabic hit-parade music, throwing soot or brake parts or tire-tread. At the port gates, we showed our passes—ragged bits of tissue paper bearing a line or two of smudged Arabic—and careered on through to the Chantier Naval Hesaro. There, in the sunshine, we went at sweaty chores on a half acre of dusty concrete, amidst partially built fishing trawlers, or yachts being refurbished, one of which, a doozy built in 1948, belonged to a member of the rock band Pink Floyd and was in for a million-dollar refit that we were told had been ongoing for years.

From New Year’s Day forth, David applied himself relentlessly to getting the boat wired and rigged and (more or less) safe for the sea. He had not just the crew’s help, but the contracted assistance of a young aide-de-camp named Hassan, whose knowledge of Agadir was encyclopedic, as well as one of the yard’s most capable artigianos, an endearing and hard-working machinist named variably “Yaya” or “Shacky,” depending on who you asked. He also had the help of a yard journeyman and, later, an electrician name Essaidi, a devout Muslim with whom I occasionally attempted to converse. Unfortunately, he was a thinking man (problematic in any culture), and his ambitions to discuss political and social philosophy with me—and on one occasion the thoughts of his fellow North African, Albert Camus—went as pearls to swine in the context of my pathetically verbless and largely brainless French.

One of the most important and time-consuming jobs was getting new hardwood handles into the dozen oars (including four spares) to which we would be entrusting our progress in the days to come. The new ones were a pearly white ash, as hard as gun metal yet less apt to cause blisters than are the state-of-the-art neoprene-wrapped handles on many sculling oars and virtually all rowing machines these days. It took four of our young crew members the better part of a week to break the old handles out of their graphite sleeves, a sliver at a time, and get the new, longer handles epoxied into place. More grueling yet was the effort of getting the “trampolines” constructed and attached—taut nylon “decks” on both sides of the boat, linking the hulls to the centrally positioned cabin, giving us a crucial six-foot-wide walking and living platform to both port and starboard.

Before we left Canada, Steve and I had agreed that we would work on the tramps together. However, in the end, it was Sylvain and Tom who were Steve’s ranking assistants, while I tootled around poking at oar handles and doing fussy work—and of course note-taking, preparing to write, which as the novelist Don Bailey once pointed out is largely a process of gazing out the window or down the beach, or peeking over the fence. At times, craving a little detachment, I simply slipped out the boatyard gate and enjoyed brief walks around the port. Anywhere there was a bit of spare ground, boatbuilders with mallets and four-inch-wide chisels banged away, hand-hewing bulgy little cypress-wood dories, or sixty-foot trawlers, gorgeous things that echoed the centuries and would, on completion, become part of the Moroccan sardine fleet, the biggest in the world.

The truth was that after the intense training of the fall and early winter—not to mention the travel, the jet lag, the abrupt change of diet and sleep—there were hours during that first week in Agadir when I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. My mood had not been improved by four days of stomach flu and now a mouthful of cankers, for me a sign that something is amiss that will only be righted by a little down time. One day Liz Koenig and I chanced a keelhauling by sneaking out of the yard for an hour to look for souvenirs that we could send home—I to my children, she to her parents and friends. And I was glad we did; it gave us a chance to get to know each other and exchange a story or two, which to my perhaps deluded mind was as important as busting ass all the time. But you couldn’t be gone long or you’d get a frosting when you got back—mostly (and justifiably) from Steve, who was working like a mule and had thereby established himself as the company yard master and conscience.

At the age of twenty-three, Liz was nonetheless among our most experienced and talented rowers, having taken up the sport when she entered St. Anthony’s High School on Long Island. She was eventually scouted by a number of universities, offered several scholarships, and ended up at the University of Rhode Island. There, during a four-year Division I career (2005–2008), she trained eight hours a day, six days a week, sufficient to put her on the podium a dozen or more times with different crews of eight at some of the sport’s premier regattas. “My one huge regret,” she said as we walked, “was that I never got to row in an NCAA final. It’s just so tough in that conference, with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Boston—all these rowing powerhouses. We came so close so many times, and just never quite got there.”

Liz has a glamorous side. Yet like Angela (and the rest of us), she has her insecurities. That day on the promenade, she said to me quietly, “Charlie, there was something I wanted to mention to you.”

After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “What is it, Liz?”

“I’m not quite sure how to put it,” she said staring out to sea, “except that I’ve been feeling a little... you know... bulky.”

I assured her she didn’t look bulky.

“No, but I feel it,” she protested. “I packed on an extra twenty pounds for the crossing, and most of it went... you know... exactly where I didn’t want it to go.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was just gonna say that if you’re going to put photos in your book, I’m wondering if you’d allow me to see what you’re going to put in that might have me in it?”

I assured her she could approve any photos that were used (the irony being that one of the two or three she eventually liked was a glorious shot of her taken from behind as she sat topless on the prow of the port hull, in a high wind, her hair flying, her arms thrown to the sun—a shot featuring the very portion of her anatomy that she had apparently been so reluctant to expose).

While they are not the least bit alike, I tended to think of Liz and Aleksa as a pair, a sort of matched Island set—in part because they are the same age and because Aleksa too attended St. Anthony’s High School, although she did not start rowing until she enrolled at Stony Brook University on Long Island. She eventually rowed for Dowling College, where she now coaches and from which she holds a post-grad degree in early childhood development. It is an unlikely complement to her full-time job as an emergency first-responder in North Babylon and her part-time career as a volunteer firefighter in Deer Park. Both are jobs in which she sees and must take in stride what she called “some of the most shocking violence” known to humanity. Meanwhile, there is a small-town innocence to Aleksa, epitomized in part by her admission that if she had to get off Long Island, driving on her own, she would be “totally unable” to find her way through the merciless bottleneck of freeways, underpasses, and bridges that connects the island to New York City and to the rest of the world beyond.

As with Liz, there were aspects of Aleksa’s person that she wanted neither exposed nor discussed in a book—she made it clear that any violations on my part would be treated with murderous severity. She was in other areas a kind of free-flowing WikiLeaks on everything from her occasionally heavy partying to her seditious pleasure in social media to the endearing intricacies of her life as the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. The family had escaped the old country when it was under the most dispiriting influences of the Soviet regime and, during thirty years on Long Island, had enacted a transcendent commitment to the preservation of Lithuanian culture, much of which had been kicked to the dogs under Muscovite imperialism. Aleksa spent her childhood and teenage summers at what she called “Lithuanian camp” in the mountains of upstate New York, putting on the costumes and learning the language, dances, music, and stories of her ancestry. Her affectionate, sometimes poignant descriptions of it all reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, in which those who love literature (most books having been burned) hide in the woods, passing memorized novels and poems on to their children.

ALONGSIDE WORK on the boat, Angela engineered a Herculean six-day bee of food sorting and packing, during which there were at times several thousand food items laid out on the concrete in sorted lots, as well as hundreds of Ziploc bags and hundreds more garbage bags, not to mention a dozen ten-pound logs of mauve-colored cling wrap.

The arrangement was this: we had all brought our own food, or had at least ordered it from the expedition supply houses, and had had it sent to Shelter Island, where it had been packed with the boat and shipped to Morocco. Most of us had brought additional food in our luggage and had picked up items from the market and stores in Agadir. The Great Sort divided it into days and, further, into lunches, dinners, and snacks. The plan was that Angela would supply some level of breakfast each day but that otherwise we would take turns cooking in pairs for the crew (which for the most part meant nothing more than heating water and adding it to envelopes of dehydrated rations).

All of this started well. However, on the fourth day rats got into the storage quarters where we kept the food at night. They ate and crapped selectively, mostly in Angela’s boxes, requiring her to pitch hundreds of dollars’ worth of meals. From that point forward the whole extravagant exercise began to seem somewhat oppressive. The harder truth was that, whereas some crew members had attempted to minimize their nutritional requirements in order to keep the weight of the boat down, others had brought what seemed a vast surfeit of entrees and desserts and snacks—and sub-snacks and pick-me-ups and treats.

Part of the disparity was that Angela had convinced some crew members they would need 10,000 calories a day—four meals, plus snacks. Roy had told us months back that no one needed or would eat more than 5,000 calories, that we simply wouldn’t feel like it, given the exertion and heat and exhaustion. He believed that when your daily ration of 5,000 calories was used up, your stored fat, if you had any, would see you through (and that when it was gone, you died).

At times I wondered what the Phoenicians or Vikings or, centuries later, the Spanish, French, and Dutch had eaten on their sea voyages. Certainly not foil packs of Bubba’s Kountry Kitchen Dehydrated Crab Gumbo (MSG-free). Or U.S. Challenger freeze-dried ice cream bars. The English, according to our British crew member Liam Flynn, ate hardtack and dried lard—and “probably lots of other really dodgy and awful stuff.”

Steve, more than I, was appalled as all of this provender, pack after pack of it—in garbage bags, in duffel bags, in dry bags, dozens upon dozens of them—was shoe-horned into the holds and hulls and onto the galley shelves of a vessel that was already weighed down with perhaps a ton and a half of hardware and appurtenances that were not aboard when we feathered so delicately down the channel off Shelter Island.

Since then, David had added four monstrously weighty solar panels that lay atop the cabin; and a pair of wind generators whose whirligigs, half as big as airplane propellers, sat twelve feet above the bridge on steel stanchions; and a thick and complex wiring harness that carried power to heavy storage batteries in one of the holds and from there to the GPS and autopilot systems, and to deck lights and running lights, and to a pair of bulky desalinators in the front holds, as well as to a half-a-dozen wall sockets where camera batteries and iPods and the boat’s two SAT phones could be recharged. He had added cooking equipment and first-aid supplies and tools; and a spare rudder; and four spare oars; and a porcelain toilet; and sump pumps; and extra bracing; and a pair of inflatable life rafts; and survival suits.

And now of course food. And more food. And bedding. And clothing. And two more people than we had had aboard at Shelter Island.

IF STEVE WAS aghast over the weight of food, he was dismayed tenfold by the arrival on January 6th, just five days before departure, of Margaret Bowling, the young Tasmanian woman who had rowed the Atlantic a couple of years earlier and to whom Angela had given first mate’s status specifically for the experience she would bring in the areas of navigation, weather awareness, charting, and so on. She would also, it was assumed, bring moral support to Angela in her attempts to direct a crew not one of whose members had rowed an ocean or rowed even a hundred miles out on one.

Unfortunately, Margaret did not have commensurate experience in handling human beings—at least those of the sort that had signed on with Big Blue. While I had my differences with her, especially over her damnable habit of telling people what to do when no telling was necessary, I eventually came to an understanding of sorts with her and found her variously exasperating, vulnerable, somewhat lonely, and perhaps a trifle nuts, although no more so than a few others aboard the boat, including myself.

If I remember correctly, it took about ten minutes on the morning of Margaret’s first working day at the boatyard for her to run afoul of Steve, from whom she demanded a “complete list” of all the medications on board.

“There’s really no need for that,” Steve told her. “Sylvain and I know what’s on board, and either he or I will be prescribing, so we’ll just leave it as is. Plus, I’m very busy right now, as you can see.”

“Well, I’d like that list,” she insisted. “I’d like it by sometime tomorrow.”

Others balked at Margaret’s adamant vetting of our kit based on stringent new limits for weight and bulk—this after we had accumulated such kit according to different, although still quite disciplined, standards. My own response, largely unspoken, was that it was a little late to begin compensating for our massive burden of food and hardware with an enforced jettisoning of light little kit items such as T-shirts and flip-flops and other bits of clothing and footwear.

Margaret’s vetting of Tom’s rather arcane paraphernalia came down to an absurd head-butting that might well have been lifted from the scripts of Harold Pinter:

MARGARET: But, Tom, don’t you see it’s not fair to the rest of the crew for you to take extra weight?

TOM: Yes, I’m sure that’s true, Margaret, and I sympathize with them; I’m all for fairness—but I’m not leaving my favorite blue jeans behind to save the weight of a few ounces of denim.

MARGARET: But, Tom, we all have to make sacrifices!

TOM: Yes, I know that’s true, Margaret, and I’m very happy to make sacrifices—name one, I’ll make it. Meanwhile, I am not leaving my jeans behind.

MARGARET: Tom, do you know what sacrifices the others are making?

TOM: No, they haven’t told me. But I’m sure it’s all very difficult for them and I’d like to know so I have a better idea what I’m up against in not leaving my blue jeans behind.

A week later, at sea, Steve was infuriated to discover that Margaret had allowed at least one of the young women on the crew to bring aboard substantial bottles of hair care products, while some of the men had been cited over significantly lighter, smaller items.

In some cases, Margaret was indisputably right in her decisions, insisting for example that Ernst Fiby, he of the Viennese wit and shaved head, leave behind a pair of clunky, high rubber Wellingtons—for the sheer space they would command, as well as the weight. She was outraged to realize later that he had snuck them aboard, although he did finally toss them in the sea, where they may yet be doing thousand-mile circles in the currents of the mid-Atlantic.

EVERY EVENING at about seven o’clock, we’d slump out of the boatyard in the winter darkness, one of us pushing Angela in her wheelchair, up the mile-long hill outside the port walls to where the city proper began and we could organize our taxi-sharing for the long ride back across Agadir to the apartment. And from there on to a restaurant for a blessed hour of nourishment and relaxation. Restaurants are an adventure in Agadir, and our search for a decent tagine or couscous led us variably to little family bistros such as Daffy’s on the back side of the city’s tourist area and into the visceral horrors of the restaurant at the Riad Hotel, where, had the tagine I ordered been 50 percent better, I’d have suspected it of coming out of a can. At the same place, Tom’s much-anticipated sixteen-ounce “Entrecote USA”—“premier slice beefsteak, fired out on our uniquely charcoaling grille”—turned out to be a slab of unidentifiable zoological matter so thoroughly ridden with fat, bone, and gristle as to be entirely inedible (it would have been funny had some poor goat or donkey not died in the service of this reprehensible restaurant).

However, for the most part we ate in a breezy little outdoor barbecue in a non-tourist neighborhood near our apartment. We referred to this decidedly unregulated kitchen as “the meat place” because it served meat, bread, and pop only, the meat purchased by the customer on skewers at the fly-ridden butcher shop next door and carried a few feet to the restaurant, where it was thrown on the grill.

One night as Steve and I and a few others sat there in the company of sparrows and cats and one or two rib-thin mutts, a guy in his early twenties came along banging his palm on the metal table tops, demanding money. I reached into my pocket, realizing when I pulled my hand out that my only cash was a pair of 200-dirham notes, worth about forty bucks each, and some Canadian coins worth perhaps a dollar. So I gave him the coins and felt anguished five minutes later when he came raging up to the table and threw the money clattering down in front of me, accompanied by a blast of indecipherable scorn.

It had been stupid of me, no doubt—lazy both culturally and morally, in that I knew the coins were of limited or no value to him. But it served as a chastening, as one’s experiences on the road, particularly the embarrassments, tend to do. Happily, a couple of nights later I saw the same guy at the same place, and was able to give him a twenty-dirham note that he pushed into his pocket without a peep as he brushed past me.

THAT THESE PRECIOUS, nervous days in Agadir were winding down was impressed upon me on the 8th of January, when David did not show up at the boatyard until nearly noon—and eventually did so in tourist clothes, subdued, having taken Lali to the airport and seen her off to Tbilisi.

Late that afternoon, with our chores done, our spirits high (and about to get higher), Steve and I left the boatyard half an hour early to get our hair chopped short at Coiffure Paris, a tidy little barbering salon that we had passed numerous times within a few blocks of the apartment.

There was only one chair, and as Steve sat down, the barber, an amiable Arab of perhaps thirty-five, asked in rough, gentle English if we’d like a shot of “Moroccan whisky.” We would, and immediately he dispatched his young friend, who returned minutes later with a pair of juice tumblers full of a steamy amber-colored fluid.

It was not until I had drained this earthy potion and Steve and I were exchanging seats so that my own shearing could begin that Steve, wearing a broadening and relaxed grin—indeed, showing a state of relaxation that I had not seen in him since our arrival—wondered aloud if I realized we had been drinking marijuana tea, quite strong marijuana tea as it turned out. As a matter of fact I had not (there was a hint of peppermint to it, perhaps masking the main ingredient). But given the new tingling in my extremities and the fact that the modest barbershop, with its antique television and shelf of bright pomades, had just now begun to seem like the funniest entertainment on earth, I did not question the news.

Having been at first somewhat nervous about the threat of hepatitis, which can be contracted through a barber’s nick, I was soon sensitized to the point where I was enjoying with a kind of dreaminess the buzzing of the clippers over my skull, then the sound of the straight razor rasping down the skin of my neck and behind my ears, emitting what for me at that point was a quite euphonious pop with the snapping of each individual hair.

But the sense of well-being was short-lived. As we emerged from the barbershop into the crowded and noisy street, a kind of cloud descended around me, a sense of vulnerability, and I was reminded with considerable force that I was at that moment sixty-three years gone, an old man, without language, in the backstreets of a Muslim city, stoned on an illegal drug, as defenseless as a baby—beyond which, of course, I was facing a challenge in the weeks to come that would either kill me ingloriously or fortify me for life’s home stretch.

At the meat place, we ingested skewer after skewer of chicken and pepper sausage and steak. And floated home. To the whorehouse. Where that night I had a staggering dream, a kind of fin du monde, in which a bloody and beheaded man appeared at the door of the apartment asking for me, attempting to push his way in, determined that he should find me. As Nigel and the others forced him from the room, he hollered over their shoulders that he knew I was in there, knew my name, knew everything about me, said he would track me down, would not rest until he had found me. And then he was gone, and in the hallucinogenic logic of the dream world, I was left pondering who he was, whether he would be able to pursue me with no head, and perhaps most significantly in this twisted Jungian conundrum, why he had been wearing my shoes.

THE BIG MORNING arrived, and in a pilgrimage more spirited than our parade to the launch ramp at Shelter Island, we grouped up around the boat as a smallish tractor hauled it at an emperor’s pace out the boatyard’s wide front gates. Each of us had a job, mine being to carry a sheet of bendy galvanized steel that could be thrown down over a rough patch in the road to allow any of the four dollies beneath the hulls to pass smoothly overtop.

As we heaved through the potholed streets, the tires on the casters, frightful little things on stamped rims and hubs, began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, a crowd of chatty and inquisitive rubberneckers fell in around us—kids with soccer balls, men in work clothes or business suits, women in Muslim head coverings, yapping dogs, gulls, gannets, the lot of them making a carnival of it, the centerpiece of which, our space-age rowboat, was a clearly irresistible piper to those who were seeing her for the first time. Left and right we went, this way and that, eventually down to the port’s monstrous boat ramp. There, the broad concrete aprons were a dry-dock for trawlers and dories and tugboats, dozens of them, beyond which, in the inky waters off the docks, floated an armada of sardine trawlers and rusting freighters, some of which gave the impression of having been there for decades. It was all quite a contrast to Big Blue, which by the time she sledded into the shallows, to a modest cheer, had made dump waste of her dolly wheels, an appropriate symbol, I thought, of her being free at last of the land.

Not quite free, as it turned out.

For as six or eight of our crew leapt aboard to row the boat over to the marina, it was clear that a bit too much of the land had been launched with her. The hulls were sitting perhaps six inches deeper in the water than at Shelter Island, a signal that the boat was now several tons heavier than it had been. To my eye, she seemed to wallow slightly as the rowers pulled away from the ramp.

Fortunately, we had a 250-mile shake-down run ahead of us on the way down the coast to Tarfaya, where we would stop briefly before heading properly to sea. If necessary, we could offload weight. We would also be consuming fifty pounds of food a day—and shedding body weight, a process at which I, to quote the television program, would eventually be the biggest loser.

My chief concern of the moment was that the interior of my mouth was still a nasty little nettle patch of cankers—a dozen or more of them, including one beneath my lower lip that was pretty much as big as a dime.

I have Margaret to thank for my timely recovery. As the lot of us fussed around the marina on the morning of Sunday, January 10, addressing last-minute adjustments to the boat, stowing kit, gathering fresh fruit and snacks for the run down to Tarfaya, she said to me, “Charlie, I have a job for you.”

My truest ambition for the next few hours had been to curl up in my bunk aboard the boat and there to log three or four hours of much-needed sleep. I had slept very little the night before and had been up early that morning to help empty and clean the apartment. I raised my eyebrows, feigning receptivity to whatever was coming, and she said quite gaily, “I want you to take a taxi to Marjane and get us eight or ten more packages of prepared cereal for the boat.”

Marjane is a cavernous supermarket at the far end of the city, near the men’s apartment, where I had already been that morning on behalf of the boat and to which I had no intention of returning—especially in one of Agadir’s sooty little orange taxis. Not that I didn’t enjoy Marjane. I did. It was an entertainment unto itself: aisles heaped with groceries and Moroccan clothing, kids in little djellabas, women gliding mysteriously past the bully beef display in their floor-length wraps and head scarves. Scruffy little sparrows that had undoubtedly lived their entire lives in the store darted around, chirping and shitting among the bulk nuts and fruit.

I agreed reluctantly to go, and was on my way down the promenade to catch a cab when I ran into our crewmate Louise Graff, who asked me with her customary affability if there was anything I needed at Marjane; she and her friends Noreen and Julie, who had their own apartment nearby, were on their way there now to get sandwich foods and oranges for the boat.

I had liked Louise immediately when we met at JFK on the way up to Shelter Island. From the start, we conversed easily and could always find something to laugh about. On the first night of training, after a couple of exhausting watches, she had endeared herself to me by reaching across from her bunk and holding my mittened hand for a minute, a gesture of graciously affectionate solidarity, which, for me, cemented our friendship. It would come as a laugher of a surprise to me when a few days hence, at sea, Louise revealed to me that Noreen, whom I had taken for a mere pal, was actually her husband, her lover, when all along I had joked with and related to her—indeed to both of them—as if they were single gals for whom I should best be on my toes as a (just slightly diminished) representative of the testicle-bearing class.

Within twenty minutes I was sacked out on the couch at their apartment, where I slept soundly for four hours and awoke as they came yoo-hooing up to the door to get me. The plan, if you had not guessed, was that I would parade over to the women’s apartment with them, hauling the cereal I had so responsibly acquired at the supermarket.

As we arrived, Margaret emerged from one of the bedrooms, looked at me quizzically and said, “That was quite a shopping trip, Charlie!”

Unsure whether she was on to me, but not about to concede, I said, “It was!” and neither of us said another word.

In the meantime, I felt infinitely better for the sleep. By evening my cankers and digestion had improved to the point where I was able to eat a walloping chicken tagine and drink a pint of beer at one of the restaurants along the seawall—a restaurant, as it turned out, that would come perilously close to killing poor Tom.

WE SLEPT the night on the boat, and awoke in a cool pre-dawn mist with no wind to speak of. At about 6:30, in the darkness, Steve and I walked to a restaurant along the seashore for a bite of breakfast and a last cup of decent French coffee. By the time we returned, Ryan had popped a bottle of champagne, and the countdown had begun. Behind us to the east a band of cloud-rippled azure was broadening above the mountains. A brigade of noisy gannets was aloft in the motionless air.

There were no heroics or theatrics as we pulled away from the dock at 8 a.m. sharp. Angela gave the “easy out,” eight blue blades made their first tentative strokes, and we cruised out into the harbor. And from there around the breakwater. David’s Moroccan adjutant, Hassan, and a few faithfuls from the boatyard had gathered to see us off. As had Deb, Noreen, and Julie. There were a few tears, probably of relief that we were finally leaving. Meanwhile, our Canadian friends, Damien Gilbert and Kelly Saxberg, climbed into an outboard Zodiac and banged out past us on the swells, shooting footage for the film they were making of the expedition.

A couple of days earlier Ernst and I had gone with Kelly and Damien up to the kasbah on the mountain behind the city to get some footage. From the thousand-foot elevation, the Atlantic had looked unspeakably vast. By comparison our little boat—our Tinkertoy experiment, just visible in the harbor below—had looked ridiculously small and fragile.

“Vare za motore on zis sing?” I had been asked the previous day by a German tourist who had wandered down the pier from Central Casting.

I tightened my bicep and patted it, and he said in dismay, “Vee are pawddling zis sing?”

“Rowing,” I said, at which point his chin began to tremble, and he howled, “Izz too zmall! Vee are dying in zis sing maybe!”